exceptional taste and talent for the conduct of large affairs has tended
still further to widen the field of their activity. The ends of the
earth, as well as the dark places nearer home, have felt the salutary
results of it.[367:1]

In this brief and most incomplete sketch of the origin of one of the
distinguishing features of contemporary Christianity--the application of
the systematized activity of private Christians--no mention has been
made of the corps of "colporteurs," or book-peddlers, employed by
religious publication societies, nor of the vastly useful work of
laymen employed as city missionaries, nor of the houses and orders of
sisters wholly devoted to pious and charitable work. Such work, though
the ceremony of ordination may have been omitted, is rather clerical or
professional than laical. It is on this account the better suited to the
genius of the Catholic Church, whose ages of experience in the conduct
of such organizations, and whose fine examples of economy and efficiency
in the use of them, have put all American Christendom under obligation.
Among Protestant sects the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the
Methodists have (after the Moravians) shown themselves readiest to
profit by the example. But a far more widely beneficent service than
that of all the nursing "orders" together, both Catholic and Protestant,
and one not less Christian, while it is characteristically American in
its method, is that of the annually increasing army of faithful women
professionally educated to the work of nursing, at a hundred hospitals,
and fulfilling their vocation individually and on business principles.
The education of nurses is a sequel of the war and one of the beneficent
fruits of it.

* * * * *

Not the least important item in the organization of lay activity is the
marvelously rapid growth of the "Young People's Society of Christian
Endeavor." In February, 1881, a pastor in Portland, Me., the Rev.
Francis E. Clark, organized into an association within his church a
number of young people pledged to certain rules of regular attendance
and participation in the association meetings and of cooeperation in
useful service. There seems to have been no particular originality in
the plan, but through some felicity in arrangement and opportuneness in
the time it caught like a forest fire, and in an amazingly short time
ran through the country and around the world. One wise precaution w